Recent Google Search Ranking Fluctuations

Jun 21, 2021 - 7:51 am 14 by
Filed Under Google Updates

Google Search Ranking Fluctuations

There has been what I would call light fluctuations in the Google search results over the past several days, some a bit over the weekend as well. There is more than the average chatter and fluctuations that you would typically see but not at really big Google update levels.

I figured I'd just write about it, just in case some of you saw ranking changes over the past several days or so, or over the weekend. But I don't think it is something at a really large scale, like you'd see from a Google core update. Nor do I think it has anything at all to do with the page experience update.

Yes, this weekend was Father's Day but still.

Here are two tools that picked up on the changes but most of the other tools are relatively calm - although, their scales and thresholds obviously may differ.

RankRanger showing increased movement over the weekend:

click for full size

Semrush showed movement on the 17th, 18th and 19th but it calmed for a day and is now back up:

click for full size

The chatter feels awkward as well, here is some of the chatter from WebmasterWorld throughout that timeframe:

Another big shakeup this morning, I had a loss of 21 long-tail terms...down 50-70 spots in some cases! Is anyone else seeing this? All of these terms now have the same groups of stock photo and ecomm sites sitting at the top over and over. It could be a temporary shakeup, but soon there will be nothing left of my rankings at all.

Has anyone else seen big drops to their home page traffic recently? Since May 25th my home page has received 20-50+% less traffic than it used to get, and from June 16th it's dropping to almost nothing. Today home page traffic is down 70%, overall search is down 40%, and direct is down 26% at 11am...almost all of that drop is lower USA traffic. This is on a day where I gained back 14 top ten terms after losing 21 yesterday...there is a much weaker correlation between ranking and traffic these days.

Extremely low traffic to global site today, Sunday ... Father's Day effect?

Really struggling to know what's going on. It doesn't help I think analytics real time is/was delayed?

Search results are a bit of a mess though.

Traffic to my home page is 70% lower this weekend. Some of my other landing pages which were down for weeks fared much better this weekend. I can only consider such a massive drop in home page traffic to be some sort of penalty in action as I have never seen these kinds of low levels in 18 years. I doubt highly its because of father's day.

another day and almost no traffic, all my pages are green (up to 98%) in terms of performance, this makes no sense at all

More movements yesterday into today? Traffic off a cliff!

It is not just the traffic, the ranking tools show changes as documented below. So who knows.

Anyway, if you noticed ranking changes - you may not be alone but keep in mind it was a Father's Day weekend, as Juneteenth was celebrated on Friday/Saturday.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

 

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